In a satirical commercial for a mock album, singer Josh Groban somberly delivers some of Kanye's tweets, including "fur pillows are hard to actually sleep on." YouTube

January 11, 2011

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Kanye West's much-ridiculed tweets earned a place among last year's Twitter highlights, which may explain why they keep popping up in unexpected, diverting ways. Last week on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" crooner Josh Groban sung classic 140-character West missives like "Do you know where to find marble conference tables? I'm looking to have a conference... not until I get the table though" and "Man... whatever happened to my antique fish tank" in a drama-drenched vibrato. (Watch a video of Groban singing the tweets here.) When Kanye's "absurd, overtly-materialistic, self-congratulatory" tweets are delivered "in Groban's Grammy-nominated tenor," says Megan Gibson in Time, they're "unreal." Here are four other ways enterprising Americans are repurposing West's snippets of wisdom:

New Yorker cartoon captionsShortly after Kanye West began tweeting last July, his followers started using his tweets as captions for New Yorker cartoons, remixing and repurposing Kanye's messages under the hash tag #kanyenewyorkertweets. "After seeing how well his words go with... New Yorker cartoons," said Brian Warmoth at Comics Alliance, "Condé Nast may want to consider offering him his own regular feature."

Reading material for Grandma...Kanye's tweets were further taken out of context last November in a video that featured an impossibly sweet grandma reading lines like "Never do coke with an intern... they may not be 21 LOL" and "Man... ninjas are kind of cool... I just don't know any personally," while surrounded by needlepoint and pictures of her grandkids. "His tweets sound much more endearing when read by a grandmother," says Ashley at Buzzfeed.

... or for childrenWhat's cuter than Grandma reading Kanye tweets? Kids reading Kanye tweets, of course. A series of Babelgum videos featured tiny tots acting out scenes (Watch here) based on Kanye tweets like "I specifically ordered persian rugs!!! What do I have to do to get a simple persian rug with cherub imagery uuuuugh." "Little kids can make anything sound cute, even Kanye West's tweets," says Jett Well at PopEater.

Pseudo "30 Rock" dialogue Another mashup relies on a reference to Tina Fey's character on the NBC sitcom, "30 Rock." In September, graphic artist John Harper found that adding "Liz Lemon" in front of Kanye tweets instantly turned them into lines that sound as if they came from the mouth of Fey's "30 Rock" costar Tracy Jordan. Case in point: "Liz Lemon, I wish I had a fashion week time machine... Gotta learn to live with with regrets." As The Huffington Post says, "the results are uncanny."